The man with the glittering gun marks gold of another kind this year as 007's cinematic juggernaut reaches 50. From Dr No to the coming Skyfall, the world's sexiest secret agent has left the filmgoing public shaken and stirred. So in an age when heroes come and go, will to world ever have enough of James Bond?

JAMES Bond is 50 this year, except that he's not. He's already turned 60. The films are celebrating 50 years of world domination, supreme profitability and major cultural impact, but Bond, James Bond, first appeared on paper at Goldeneye, Ian Fleming's house in Jamaica, on or soon after January 15, 1952.

Fleming's lover Ann Charteris was about to become Mrs Fleming. She was pregnant and Fleming needed money quickly. He was also trying to take his mind off his terror of matrimony. The world's most popular spy, the debonair and sexually promiscuous 007, was partly born out of fear and sexual frustration.

The Bond franchise is the most successful in film history.

As Fleming's biographer Andrew Lycett puts it, Charteris was "hors de combat", (out of action) sexually. She was being especially careful because their first child, Mary, had died eight hours after a premature birth.